Last week, at the end of their run, the costume staff of The Shakespeare Theatre Company sorted all of their Argonautika costumes, sent them out for dry-cleaning and laundering, and boxed them up into 16 huge boxes to go on the trucks headed up to Princeton.

Yesterday, I stumbled into our wardrobe room where our costume shop staff was unpacking the boxes. That may not seem like such a big deal, so here is some perspective: there are 14 cast members, each plays between 1-6 characters and there are an average of 5-10 individual costume pieces per character. Each of those needs to be carefully unpacked, steamed, repaired (they just finished a long run!) and sorted so that when the actors arrive tomorrow, they are ready to go. It was a big job.

Along with the costumes are boxes of fabric swatches with the extra fabric that was used to make the costumes (in case it is needed for a repair or alteration) and the “costume bible,” a huge binder that archives the costumes for the entire production. The costume bible has a section for each costume, with the original sketch of the costume, a photograph of the actor in the costume, a list of all the pieces in the costume (from underwear to jewelry), fabric swatches and records of where each type of fabric was purchased, notes on the original fitting and a history of any repairs or alterations to the costume. When there is a question about whether it was Hera’s or Aphrodite’s 6-inch platform shoes that had the glitter on it, the costume bible is the place to go to figure it out.

And no, that wasn’t a hypothetical example.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under Argonautika, Out of the Box. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.